From: Brian Atkins (brian@posthuman.com)
Date: Fri Sep 29 2000 - 12:05:07 MDT
This all reminds me of a little exchange from the movie Star Trek IV:
Near the end of the movie, they have successfully captured two whales, and
are ready to head back into the future. On the ship Spock is concerned that
he is having trouble making the _exact_ calculations required to get them
back to the future. Without exact figures to work with, he says that there
may be no way to proceed and get back to the future successfully. Dr. McCoy
I believe then informs him that he should take a GUESS- an educated one.
Spock seems to consider all the possibilities, and comes to the conclusion
that he would rather take a guess and try to get them back to the future
rather than let everyone die.
Here we have many people stuck in a similar dilemma- without perfect
knowledge of how an AI-produced Singularity will play out, they are extremely
hesitant to go forward. However what they must realize is that an educated
guess is the best we can do in some cases such as this, and compared to the
alternatives it is the only rational choice.
-- Brian Atkins Director, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence http://www.singinst.org/
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